Re: Gui for Ubuntu server

John Hasler wrote:
Jon writes:

Getting us to play 'twenty questions'?

He's just a non-native writer of English who is trying to minimize the
amount of English he has to write (he's doing better than I would in
Italian). Unfortunately his efforts are having the opposite effect. He
needs to bite the bullet and compose a complete explanation of what he
is actually trying to accomplish.

The difference between a technician and an engineer - A technician
wants to answer a client's questions. An engineer wants to solve a
client's problems. Sometimes the two are the same and sometimes
they are not.

When someone asks a question that does not make sense, they are
often making guesses on what to do next and they are making the
wrong guesses. It's important to find out what they are really trying to
accomplish to get them on the right path.

Here's an example of what happened to me recently that shows the
same pattern with different details -

One of my DBA colleagues came by asking for help with the "split"
command. Then another one asked about finer details than a line
count. Then the first one came back for further details. The problem
is Oracle deals with binary files and they were asking me for details
of a text utility trying to make it do binary work.

It became clear to me that they had a problem they were trying to
solve and they were going down the wrong path and making no
progress. I walked over to where the crowd was forming trying to
solve the problem and I asked for status.

It turned out they had a corrupt Oracle *.dbf data file that was the
wrong size. Probably so data had been appended to it using a
">>" or a program did the equivalent. There was no guarantee that
was all that was wrong, but at least that much was wrong. I asked
if they knew what size the file was supposed to be. They knew. I
asked them to run a man page for "dd" and started taking notes to
build a command line. I asked them to run a calculator to see if the
desired size was an even multiple of 512 bytes. It was. So I gave them
my notes on the dd command line with the if= clause of the broken
file, the of= clause of the desired output file, the bs= clause of the
512 byte even multiple, and the count=clause to give the desired
size of the output.

With that generated file they were able to start Oracle and run an
audit on the data to determine what else was wrong. No amount of
effort working on "split" would ever have helped them at all.

Question not answered, problem solved in spite of not answering their
initial question.

Moral of the story - When someone asks a question that seems wrong,
simply answering their question probably will not help them solve their
problem. It is time to ask them what they are trying to accomplish so a
different and better approach can be taken.
.

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